Abort Retry Ignore
MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) debuted 28 years ago, quickly finding its way into labs on PCs in offices or attached to instruments. Programs such as BASIC promised much. We just knew, deep down, that computers meant less paper, effortless statistics, and (ha, ha) fewer telephone calls.
Nearly three decades should be enough time for a technology that doubles in capacity every two years (Moore's law) to accomplish all this. But modern information systems generate more paper, telephone calls, and steps than our old paper system ever did. We fill a dozen recycle bins a day, generate dozens of corrected and amended reports, worry about intermittent network failures, and spend hours on the telephone arguing with "support" that something doesn't work. We tolerate a standard that is sometimes unresponsive, often inadequate, and frequently burdensome.
Don't get me wrong – it's great to get statistics, retrieve results, or send reports instantly. But let's be real. Do we really know results are stored correctly in history? Do we really know reports are sent to the correct doctor? Do we really know calculations are done correctly? All software is buggy.
Somewhere along the way we started working for these machines, which, for all their speed and memory, are painfully slow. More and more time is spent waiting for a computer to retrieve, process, or print. Patients are compared to barcodes, stickers, and wristbands. Quality control is driven by point-at-a-time rule decisions, inviting techs to repeat until in. The days of multitasking, holding a requisition in hand, and glancing at a dozen plots on a wall are gone, replaced by efficiency designed by people who are, for the most part, not laboratory professionals. I wonder when this "efficiency" will happen.
Any application needs a simple test: does it suggest a better way of doing what we do now? We don't buy potential, after all, but performance. Each laboratory needs to define what "better" means, and managers should listen to their techs. The bookends are still the doctor and the patient, and computers need to shorten the distance between the two.